


Two Birds and a Stone

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-28
Updated: 2014-09-28
Packaged: 2018-02-19 03:09:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2372315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can bring a person back from the dead, you can treat their symptoms, you can even cover them up, but you can't bring back their daemon. [daemon fusion fic].</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Birds and a Stone

**Author's Note:**

> SO [the-letter-zed](http://the-letter-zed.tumblr.com/) came into my inbox and was like "WHAT ARE YOUR HEADCANONS ON PDS AND THEIR DAEMONS" and 6k later, I was like, "what just happened."
> 
> So it's a little rough! I intended it to be a Tumblr ficbit, except ... you know, 6k. DAEMONS HAPPENED, I'M SORRY.
> 
> **Warnings** for a direct mention of suicide and typical levels of zombie apocalypse violence.
> 
> This hasn't been carefully proofread or Britpicked, sorry!

-

 

"Amy?" Frankie's voice climbs over the others to tap her on the shoulder, and Amy can't help but flinch up, onto her feet, feeling raw all over. She moves for the curtains, because why is it so dark in here, why is everybody sitting in the dark, how can they --

_"Amy!"_

Pain shoots through the front of her skull, and she lifts her hand to her nose with a sudden shock of fear, because she can't have a nosebleed, not here, not in front of five witnesses -- except she stops. And stares.

Three small golden particles move around the ends of her fingertips. Before her naked eye, clearly visible in the dark, they multiple.

_Dust,_  Amy thinks.  _I'm making Dust._

And she collapses.

 

-

 

Before it started falling out, Bran's fur was the softest, most luxurious thing in Amy's world, and she always fell asleep with him tucked under her chin, bushy tail draped over her shoulder.

The color, too, brightly burnt like the best of autumn -- a color, she finds, rather like Jem Walker's hair.

"Is that natural?" she asks her, because the girl's watching her like a cat in the grass and she can't see her roots from here. "My Bran had fur that exact same color. He got so self-conscious about it, you know, right after he settled, so I tried to dye my hair to match. It came out green," and she laughs, the memory of their horror suddenly technicolor, and it's as ingrained and instinctive as sneezing, the act of looking for Bran to share it with her.

Except he isn't there.

 

-

 

"What was he?" The words tiptoe over, tugging at the hem of her skirt for attention, and Kieren angles his body away so, she thinks, she can pretend she didn't hear him if she needs to.

"A red panda," she tells him. "We never had the energy for him to try a lot of shapes, and that one always fit best, we thought," and she mimes something small and furry pouncing, fingers playfully hooked into claws, before sighing. "Oh, I loved his face so much, it was so perfect for a nuzzle."

She looks over to find the first true smile on his face she's seen since he opened the door. 

She nudges him with her elbow. "What about yours? What was she?"

His shoulders jump, too sharply to be called a shrug. For a long time, she thinks he isn't going to answer, and then he unfolds from the bed and crosses to the bookshelf, returning with a frame that had sat face-down among several others. He holds it out to her: the Kieren in the photograph is the smaller, awkwarder, more incomplete version of the one standing in front of her -- Year 9, at the most -- and in his hand, perched on his third knuckle, is --

"Kieren Walker, that is the smallest bird I have ever seen."

His mouth quirks. "A wren, actually."

 

-

 

When Wren Walker was thirteen years old, he sat down with Dolce and the both of them decided that they knew exactly what they were and it really wasn't worth it to put it off, you know?

So that was that, and three days later found Kieren in the art room after school, complaining about the condition of the school watercolor brushes while Dolce flitted from his ear to his palette to the back of his hand, balancing atop his brush as he finished a late assignment. She said, "Kieren," softly, and he looked up to see Rick Macy come through from the darkroom in his football kit. Behind him, his daemon shifted from trotting boar to tabby cat, leaping up onto the table to give Dolce a curious sniff. Dolce fluffed up her feathers in response, which really only made her look like a small, irate tennis ball.

Rick said, "She's picked, then?"

And Kieren: "Yeah."

"All right. Fits you."

And since that was the only thing that mattered, Kieren grinned with all his teeth, and to Rick he was Wren Walker from that moment on.

 

-

 

She pecked at his hands, his face, but in the end she was simply too small to stop him; the black yawn of the cavern inside of him was too large for her to cross. Her last words to him were, "Kieren, _please._ Kieren, no, you're _hurting_ me," and when he looked at the blood and knew he was past the point of no return, the relief was indescribable.

 

-

 

The whole drive from Norfolk, nobody talks about anything important -- just DVDs, and Amy Winehouse, and how his cousin Ibrahim's daemon settled into an orca shape in the middle of the local quarry and they had to call the army out to airlift them to the closest sea-daemon collective. Now the whole family's scrambling to get their house sold, but, you know, bad time for the market and all that.

"So long as they don't call us to help them pack," his dad says laughingly, double-checking to make sure Selmine's hitch is secure for motorway driving.

Kieren has a million questions, but as the hours pass and traffic gives way to the low roads and rolling hills of Roarton Valley, he finds that he really only has the one: _Will Jem and Arabet be happy to see me?_

 

-

 

The door slams and Jem's voice barrels on through ahead of her "-- off to all day, then? You missed church!" and then she catches sight of him and skids to a halt, ponytail swinging and Arabet pitching forward off her shoulders with an indignant squawk.

Kieren swallows hard. Arabet regains his balance, flipping his tail and hulking against the neck of Jem's camo jacket, and she lifts a finger to point.

" _No,"_ she snarls, and, louder, "I can smell that _fucking rot_ from here!"

She crashes on through, disappearing up the stairs, and his dad offers him a pained smile and a "well," and Kieren swallows, swallows, swallows, but there's a dry patch in his throat that scratches him hoarse.

With difficulty, he asks, "… was he a carrion crow?"

"A rook," his mother corrects swiftly, shifting her grip on her fork. "Same … same family, perhaps, with the same proclivities, but very intelligent and resourceful, as far as bird daemons go. Says a lot about her adaptability. We're very proud, aren't we, Steve?"

"Could just be a phase, too," his dad counters. "Maybe it's not final. We always did think Jem was going to settle late, remember?"

And Kieren would be more impressed with the sheer scope of his father's obliviousness, if his ostrich daemon couldn't clearly be seen burying her head behind him.

 

-

 

It's a few days after the fact, when they're done helping the Lancasters hang their MISSING posters and on their way back home, that Jem works up the courage to tell them. Her shotgun hangs low along her arm, and her dad's nail-studded two-by-four swings with his every step.

They turn off of High Street, past the tenements and the bridge where the rotters liked to plan ambushes, Jem with one parent on either side of her. Selmine trots on ahead, and her mother's rabbit daemon is tucked inside her jacket, nose twitching nervously. Arabet watches their six, and Jem pays attention to the weight of him on her shoulder, knowing it'll be that way for the rest of their lives.

It won't surprise anyone, she knows, that this is the event in her life that drove Arabet to settle. Daemon permanence is a frequent side-effect of trauma: her cousin Ibrahim blew the head off a rotter for the first time while he was out at the quarry with the Durham division of the HVF and found that his daemon couldn't change back, after. She supposes she should be glad Arabet's a rook, and not a killer whale.

Mum breaks the silence first. "That's marvelous, dear. See?" she says brightly, lobbing the last over her head to her husband. "I always said the kids took after you."

_Because I have a bird daemon like Dad's,_ Jem realizes. _Kieren and I, we both picked bird daemons like Dad's._

Except Dad doesn't even glance at her, and when he speaks, he does so so casually that Jem doesn't even see the hit for what it is until Mum stops walking, hand half-raised like she's checking herself for wounds.

"All things considered," says Steve Walker to his wife of twenty years. "I think Kieren took after you."

And after that, Jem's parents don't speak to each other for a month.

 

-

 

Outside the Legion, where an enormous handmade "WE SUPPORT THE HVF" banner partially obscures the more customary notice of "Oversized Daemons Welcome," Kieren catches Amy's elbow, pulling her back with a fierce, "We can't go in there!"

"Why not?" she fires back, and the streetlights turn her eyes moon-colored, her pupils torn in them like bullet holes. "Because we're _naked?"_

"For one, yeah!"

"Tell me, Kieren, do you miss your Dolce?" He flinches as if stung, so she steps in close, curling her hands in the front of his hoodie. He has nowhere to look but at her. "Do you find yourself turning your head, absolutely _sure_ you've seen her in your peripheral?" A nod. "Do you feel empty, gutless, listless, without motivation, anger, or drive?"

A pause. He all but vibrates against her, needing to be inside, needing to be outside, needing to be here and far away. He shakes his head. No.

"Me neither," Amy whispers. "Bran was my fucking best friend and I miss him like I miss oxygen, but I _don't. Feel. Daemonless._ Do you?"

A longer pause, and then a shake.

"A daemon always knows when a person doesn't have a daemon. Christ, it's as obvious as if you're walking around rabid. Those people at the faire, they couldn't tell our daemons were dead, couldn't they, not until they got close to us and realized we weren't hiding them in our pockets. Everybody thinks that because we're PDS, we're just walking corpses, and we shouldn't laugh or have fun or remember the good things because _they_ can't imagine doing that without their daemons. But we can. Do you know what that means?"

Shake.

"It means," and she pushes herself up, glancing a kiss off of his jaw. For luck. "We're going to go in there and I'm going to make a scene, and you're going to see your Rick."

 

-

 

See, the thing is, is that everybody's right. 

PDS _shouldn't_ be able to laugh, or have fun, or create good things, because that's what a daemon is, and their daemons didn't come back with them when they Rose.

Daemons are conduits; they wear the shape of your soul. They forge affection with each other, they make your terrors and your rages visible, they are the wellspring that innovation comes from -- bouncing an idea back and forth with Dolce as it grew and grew and grew, Kieren found, was like sitting in a peer group the second you all realized you agreed on something obscure, or being ten people deep at a concert. It became every throb of his heart. And to severe that …

It's unspeakable. Seeing someone without a daemon is as unsettling as if someone queued up behind you at Sainsbury's without their head.

No wonder people draw their children away when they realize what he is.

No wonder he can't look at himself in the mirror.

 

-

 

Bill Macy's daemon is a great wild hog with coarse fur the same grey-brown of winter woodland, hoary tusks protruding from under her lip, and a snout constantly snuffling and drooling mucus. 

As a child, Kieren'd been terrified of her, and the only thing that has changed, he thinks, is that he doesn't have to worry about Dolce being trampled on and gored anymore.

In the doorway, Janet Macy stares in mute horror as Kieren surges right into Bill's space. Clasped in her arms, her fox daemon pants, open-mouthed with fright.

Rick mentioned it once or twice, how he and his mum's daemon used the hog's poor eyesight to their advantage, helping him sneak in and out of the house when he wanted to go over to Wren's. It became easier after his daemon settled and could bark an echo of a grainy image into the hog's ears, making her snort and shake her head and look the other way, oblivious. Rick's daemon became adept at using sonar to confound others as a matter of survival.

"And it was _your fault,"_ swills and slops out from between Bill's teeth. "Your fault she became that grotesque, blood-sucking _little rat_ instead of what she was meant to be!"

"That's what _they were!"_ Kieren howls back. "They were small and winged because they were _like me!"_

"He was an impostor! I should have known what he was, I should have known he wasn't really my son, even before he left. What kind of man has an only son who's a vampire bat?"

And it's as sudden a plunge as if he'd been flung off a cliff. Kieren stops, and stares, and says, "You blind, stupid, ignorant _pig."_

He lunges for the knife, but Janet beats him to it, and the fox flings himself at the hog with a piercing, hateful yowl. 

The house erupts into chaos.

 

-

 

"I never asked," says Sue Walker, later, sitting against the cave wall with her knees drawn up to her chest. "Exactly?"

"A ghost bat," her son replies. "The false vampire bat. Doesn't suck blood, doesn't even cut others to make them bleed the way vampire bats do. She had clear wing membranes, remember, that looked like watercolor?" And Sue's eyes widen, understanding, suddenly, the nature of a few of the paintings in their home. With a rueful gesture, he finishes, "They roost in caves, so this was where we -- where we felt safest."

 

-

 

To rook somebody means to cheat them, or defraud them.

"I told everyone I ran out of bullets," Jem Walker tells the brother sitting on her bed. Her daemon hops up onto her knee, and her fingers start carding through his glossy black feathers. "But I didn't. And when we realized we weren't ever going to tell Mr and Mrs Lancaster -- our mate's _parents_ \-- that was it for Arabet and I." She shrugs sharply. "We're always going to be defined by that, Kier," and her mouth twists, "-- we're carrion eaters. _We're_ the fucking rot."

"That's not true," Kieren says softly. "You know that's not true."

In chess, the rook is the only piece capable of castling a king -- the act of switching places with it in order to defend it from attack.

 

-

 

Their father has always been visible from a distance, the way people with oversized daemons often are. Selmine stands a head above in a crowd, her gait ungainly and her profile blatantly bizarre -- which was, frankly, their father in summary: awkward and earnest.

When they were little and trying to duck the consequences of something they did or didn't do (usually it was something small, like not having brushed their teeth or completed a chore, but when you're little these things are all-encompassing,) she used to chase Dolce and Arabet down and sit on them, fluffing herself out on top of them like she was making a nest. Dad would fist his hands atop his hips and ask, "well, excuse you, what kind of egg do you call this, then?" until Kieren and Jem shrieked with laughter and cried uncle.

In the graveyard, Selmine trumpets out a ghastly noise and charges at Pearl Pinder, coming so close that the woman startles, upending herself backwards over a gravemarker. 

Her bullet goes wide, and lodges itself in Simon Monroe's shoulder.

It all happens so fast, but Jem swears, just for a moment, that she sees the wink of small, golden particles of Dust, spraying from the impact.

 

-

 

The first thing Simon remembers is the unpleasant sensation of something tacky on his chin, like he'd slopped a pint down himself and it'd dried overnight.

He can't seem to move his arms, though, so it'll have to wait.

The second thing he remembers is the sight of a man's receding hairline, right underneath his nose. He pulls his head back, discomfited, and the hairline coalesces into a head, shoulders in a white coat, and a peculiar headset that looks not unlike a set of aviator goggles, currently trained at a spot directly beneath Simon's breastbone.

Tinnily, overhead a voice exclaims, "-- Victor! By God, Victor, are you seeing this? That's Dust -- actual, live Dust!"

"I see it!" says the man currently occupied in making Simon's personal space feel subjective at best. Beyond him, a rust-colored shape lumbers past on its knuckles -- an orangutan daemon. "It's responding to the dose. Get Oxford on the phone, Dr Weston, and the army too -- we're going to need a grant for a bigger Glass."

Simon lifts his chin --

The overhead voice abruptly changes pitch, "Jesus _Christ,_ Victor, get back -- that thing's _alive!"_

"Hrrn," Simon grinds out, somewhat reproachfully, because what the hell else would he be?

 

-

 

There's this idea everybody's got -- even the people who were actually there, who you'd think would know better -- that when the dead Rose, they went after the daemons of the living.

It's a load of crock, of course, just like that rumor that if you got bit by a rotter you'd turn into one in twenty seconds (the act of confessing all of one's sins during this time became so widespread that it was actually written into law that you could not be held accountable for it in court,) but it's the kind of juicy, terrible thing that refuses to die, probably because that's what people are scared of most. There's no greater horror imaginable than something laying hands on your daemon.

But when you're rabid, the only thing you care about is brain matter. It's the only thing you can digest and metabolize; that part doesn't change with treatment.

Why would PDS in their untreated state care about souls? 

Can't chew on a soul.

 

-

 

Maxine Martin's daemon is a long-legged serval, and he remains poised atop the filing cabinet in her office as she calls in the PDS one by one to fill out their paperwork. He's the picture of elegance -- gracefully curved spine, ears sloped forward, tail flicking like a metronome.

The two of them, Kieren finds, have identical predatory smiles.

"She'll all right for a politician though, innshe?" he overhears Gary say to Phil Wilson outside on the road while they're sorting out the transportation vans for Give-Back. Gary's the only person he knows with a daemon as big as his father's -- a black bear with a white patch on her breast like a shield, lumbering protectively and near-sightedly at Gary's heels -- and he folds his arms, arranging his grip on his electric cattle prod with ease.

Phil looks uncomfortable. "I -- I don't catch your meaning," he says, eyeing the weapon.

His sheepdog daemon skulks around the circle of PDS, darting back and forth and penning them in: herding cattle at its finest, Kieren thinks.

"Well, no way you're gonna trust your MP if she's got, say, a centipede or a poisonous snake or a newt, right? Can't trust a creepy-crawly. The vicar, remember, always said you wanted your leaders to have warm-blooded daemons -- meant they cared about something other than themselves. Plus," Gary adds, gruffer. "She's a good woman. Good priorities."

A voice speaks up behind Kieren, startling him out of his eavesdropping: "You're still pretending, I see."

Blankly, he looks over his shoulder. 

Simon lifts his eyebrows, nodding pointedly at Kieren's jacket pocket. Some months ago, at Mum's suggestion, he'd tucked a tennis ball in there. From a distance, it's easy to mistake the shape of it for a mouse daemon, or of course -- a wren. Kneejerk, he sticks his hand in his pocket, missing the feeling of Dolce's feathery head and back under his fingertip. He'd carried her to school like this numerous times, the two of them chirping sleepily at each other the whole way.

"Who are you trying to comfort with all of this," Simon makes a gesture that encompasses the lumpy pocket and the cover-up both. "Them?" The gesture moves to include Gary and Phil's turned backs.

He shrugs. "Maybe it's for my own comfort."

"Right," and the worst part is, Simon sounds like he believes it.

He's not the only one here with something similar: Idris Mugawbe carries a knapsack, and Brian's got a leather pouch around his neck like the kind people use to transport small insect daemons; roaches or spiders. They might have fooled _somebody_ with this camouflage if not for the enormous "I'm PDS" plastered on them in bright orange.

(At home, Dad still asks after Dolce, and buys the nut-and-berry birdseed mix from the Carnforth's store with the same head-in-the-sand obliviousness he uses when he puts food on Kieren's plate. He treats her like she's just being shy and staying out of sight, like he thinks if Kieren came home then it's only a matter of time until she does too.)

 

-

 

Jem still has one box of dye left, thrown underneath the sink with the bleach and the toilet brush and the hairspray leftover from when she was twelve and wanted soft waves like Demi Lovato.

She's still feeling swimmy and nauseous from her encounter with Charlotte Briggs, and the whole way home she carries Arabet in the crook of her elbow so that she can keep her mouth pressed against his head for comfort. He squeezes her arm with his talons, reassuring, and when she turns up their drive and sees Amy Dyer sitting in the doorway, it's not even the strangest thing that's happened to them today.

"Want to dye your hair?" she says by way of greeting, transferring Arabet back to her shoulder. "I've got a box of that rust red you liked."

" _Jem!"_ Arabet hisses as Amy's head comes up. "What are you _doing?"_

She has no idea. Each vertebrae in her spine locks up one-by-one, like the weight of Amy's PDS eyes are crushing down on her shoulders like Atlas. Her daemon twists his head around, eyeballing her skeptically.

Amy squints up at her with a similar look, then says, "hang on, I've got --" and digs in her clutch purse, surfacing with a pair of overlarge sunglasses that she pops on. The crease in her forehead smooths out. "Sorry. Hangover. You're very bright to look at, you know. Just painful," and she grins. It takes Jem a moment to recognize the tease, and she rolls her eyes.

She keeps them on the entire time they're knelt in front of the tub, no matter how dim Jem makes the lighting or how she has to crane her head to keep it under the spray, and it occurs to her that maybe Amy's being kind.

"Look," she says as they're toweling her hair dry, and Arabet hops over the counter, pulling Kieren's washcloth off the mirror to show her. "It didn't come out green."

Amy feathers her fingers through the ends of her hair, admiring the way it glints newly-minted and copper.

"That's a proper panda color, that," she says admiringly. "Bran would have been absolutely ecstatic," and her mouth crumples, forming a happy-sad moue that Jem recognizes on every level. "Thank you, Little Walker."

"Hey now," Jem protests, but then Amy flinches all over, hand flying to her skull like someone who's just been struck. 

Jem moves instinctively, without panicking or even thinking, and touches the back of her blazer. "You okay?"

"Fine," comes the swift reply. "I'm fine. Just," she makes devil's horns with a hand that's visibly trembling. "Rock n' roll."

 

-

 

"Amy! _Amy!"_

Her eyes slam open and her hands starfish out, grasping and scrabbling at both carpet and Simon's shoulder. He's knelt over her, having tried to roll her onto her side and cushion her head simultaneously as she seized, and the neurotrypsaline injector gun lays abandoned on the floor beside her. His eyes are swollen, frightened, as large as light fixtures in his head, and he's the only thing she can clearly see.

"Hey," he goes urgently, and his hands scrape her hair back, pushing the new color off her forehead and out of her mouth. "Hey, it's all right. Amy, breathe. Breathe, love, _breathe._ Six seconds in, ten seconds out, all right?"

She opens her mouth to remind him they're PDS and it's unnecessary, except what comes out is a wail.

"It _hurts,"_ and she uses her grip on him to pull herself upright. He steadies her with an arm around her back. "It _hurts,_ Simon, like something's trying to cleave me right open. And I _miss_ him. Everything I do reminds me of him, and I want him here. Does that make me weak, to want him back? Does that mean I'm not Redeemed?"

"No!" And he combs through her forelocks with his fingers again, hands coming around to cup her face. "No, Amy, don't ever think that."

She closes her eyes, giving into the crush of it and letting him hold her up. Next she speaks, it's in a whisper that flutters, pale and papery and moth-like, out of her mouth.

"… don't you miss her?" she asks, plaintive, and Simon startles. "Don't you miss her at all?"

He trips into giving an honest answer.

"I -- not as much," and his mouth works uncomfortably. "We -- we didn't ever really get along. We weren't -- friends, exactly."

Her eyes come open at that. 

A pause, and she says, "You said she was … didn't you? I remember, you were joking with Frankie Kirby -- you, the preacher who had a praying mantis daemon in his first life."

"Ironic, isn't it? But being one of the animal kingdom's most cold-blooded killers didn't inspire much trust in me, I'm afraid, not from my parents or my mates or the academic board at uni. She resented me for being embarrassed of her, and I … eventually, I didn't care enough to even resent her back." She stares at him, and he drops his eyes, shoulders coming up. "To be honest, Amy … I prefer this. I prefer it like this."

 

-

 

He steps up to Simon in the street and Simon lifts a hand to catch him, thumb and forefinger against his chin the same way you'd make a perch for a small and flighty bird, and Kieren's in the middle of kissing him for it when he feels it.

It happens inside his chest, in that spot above his navel and below his sternum, the place that goes liquid with dread and white-hot with anger and twisted up with joy, the place he's used to feeling become molten when he's inspired. It is the place he has always, _always_ thought of simply as Dolce's. It is the place every human reaches for when they reach for their daemon.

And it flutters.

He pulls back.

Simon's already frowning, brows drawn close together, and Kieren doesn't need to ask.

"You felt that."

"Yeah," says Simon faintly.

"Okay," and Kieren takes his hands out of his pockets. "Kiss me again, will you?"

"Don't we have somewhere we need -- mmh," and this time, when Kieren sways in, he catches him by the jaw with both hands, pulling him up onto the balls of his feet and kissing him back with feeling. The cover-up on their mouths turns tacky, smearing across their lips and teeth. 

The sensation in his gut, he finds, is not unfamiliar. 

He once read it described like butterflies in the stomach, footprints on the heart, but nobody needs it defined, not really.

It's like when he was little, and Selmine would put one foot on Dolce to pin her down and then nest on her head, even as she flitted from wombat to weasel to worm and writhed hard to escape, and Kieren, feeling smothered with affection, shouted laughter across the room until his dad found him. It's like how sometimes when he was a teenager and pulling eleven-hour sleeping sprints while his body yawned itself long and thin, he'd wake up to find his mother's rabbit daemon on the bedside table, giving Dolce a velveteen, whiskery kiss. It's Arabet holding Dolce just outside of Kieren's comfort range so that Jem got to the passenger side door first, shouting triumphantly.

Perhaps most importantly, it's like that time in the cave, Rick and Kieren shoulder-to-shoulder, legs thrown up against each other and bottle an excuse to put their hands over each other's, and then Rick's bat daemon reached over with one folded wing and stroked the top of Dolce's head: her ears pricked forward, her nose upturning with her smile, and Rick and Kieren went very still. Then Rick said, "shut up, Wren Walker, you shut up," and Kieren felt like there were balloons expanding beneath his ribs.

It's the feeling of one's daemon brushing against another's.

Except he and Simon don't have daemons.

(They turn up at the Walker house tellingly grey-lipped, but it's not the most embarrassing thing Kieren does at his supper table today, so.)

 

-

 

In the budget motel with the plastic curtains and the view of the unkempt lot and the dank, glassine shape of Etihad Stadium -- it had fallen into disrepair during the Rising, although he did read a pamphlet on the train over that said the army used it to set a trap for rotters seeking sanctuary, and that's why the groundskeeper has such a hard time keeping the grass nice these days, all that black blood, you know, really gets into the sod! -- Simon puts his back into a corner and hyperventilates.

He should have known.

The Prophet knew -- the Prophet must have looked at him and known instantly.

It didn't matter that he woke up and she wasn't there. It didn't matter that he thought maybe this was it, maybe she wasn't going to define him anymore.

She's always going to be there, isn't she -- the shape of Simon's soul, its claws and its appetite. Just because the mantis isn't visible doesn't mean she's not --

The Prophet. The Prophet looked at him and saw _her_ and now he's got to -- he's got to be -- an assassin? 

Oh, god, he's going to be an assassin. He's got to kill -- no, he can't even feel the shape of it in his head, he can't, he _cannot_ put the words together, the shape of "kill" and "Kieren", they're on polar opposite sides of his mind and he _can't_ put them together and accept what it means.

The part of him that is still small and green and apathetic -- she tells him this will be easy. It will be over so quick.

_That's not me!_ Simon shouts back, his hands spasming in front of him, the world beyond them fuzzing away. _You're not me!_

 

-

 

He swears, afterwards, that he can feel an ache in his shoulder, like if he lifted his fingertips to the bullet wound, they'd come away bright red with blood. 

Like the pain in his spine, it's strongest in bad weather. He wonders what he would look like in Halperin & Weston's lab now, underneath their Glass with all these leaks in him. How much Dust is he making?

 

-

 

To Kieren, he says, "I see no lump in your pocket."

A smile lifts through Kieren's face, hitting the shock-white of his eyes, and his hands automatically come up to smooth down the lines of his mourning suit.

"Rather think the lump's in my throat, now," he says with something that might actually be shyness, and in his chest, Simon swears his beatless heart kicks. "I don't need it anymore. I don't feel daemonless, Simon. I don't look at myself and see something obscene. It's --" his shoulders rise in a small and helpless gesture. "I'm okay. Amy wanted me to be okay and I'm okay."

 

-

 

It happens in the churchyard on the hill, past the quarantine tape and far from the cemetery where Kieren is currently trying to anchor himself down to Rick Macy's grave to the sound of drumbeats.

Amy Dyer stops walking two paces past a monument with four generations of Flynns listed on it. Helen Flynn's name is gouged through, the dirt she crawled up out of combed over; she's currently at her daughter's ballet rehearsal.

Phil goes as far as her arm's length and then comes back. "Amy," he says, and tugs, one hand in hers and the other holding the auburn tiger plush -- it was the closest to a red panda he could win for her, although she'd waffled for a while, wondering if she wanted the plush with wings instead. _Rather fond of wings, these days,_ she'd said. "Come on."

"I can't," and something in her voice makes him look at her, all his attention telescoping down to her. 

Her free hand's pressed down over her breastbone, and when she looks at him, her eyes are wide enough to spin on. "Philip, I _can't."_

And then she twists around, hand tearing free of his and skirts kicking up around her boots, and she takes off between the headstones. She gets as far down as Kieren Walker's grave before she stops again, so abruptly she almost pitches forward. Phil's sheepdog daemon is on her heels, so he sees through her eyes, the way Amy pushes against her chest like it hurts -- the same way you'd hurt if you were at the end of your daemon's tether.

She whirls. " _Bran!"_ she cries out. _"Bran!"_

And to his dying day, Philip Wilson swears he hears it.

He hears it. It answers, "Here!"

Everything, after that, happens so fast.

Behind them, Maxine Martin says, breathless and ecstatic, "Amy Dyer."

And between the headstones, in the damp grass, the serval daemon streaks forward with intent. Claws outstretched, he pounces at the small, white shape of a dove, resting on Dorothy Dyer's grave. Feathers explode into wingbeats.

The serval yowls.

Philip yells. His daemon tears after the cat, snarling and barking, and Amy becomes a weight, sinking, sinking down.

 

-

 

The light from the headlamps of the rental car flood the graveyard, and in the darkness pooled beyond it, she sits down and tries not to scratch at the mud that camouflages the white patches in her fur.

In silence, they watch the hazmat suits dig at the fresh grave.

Eventually, the sheepdog whispers, "what are they going to do when they realize the coffin's empty?"

Philip Wilson says, "Shh."

It's very rude to _bury_ the dead, you know, especially when those dead have a habit of coming back in order to complain about the inconvenience. You'd think people would know that by now.

 

-

 

There are some people who believe that the PDS are a new species. 

There's a programme on Channel 5 about it, and Frankie's mum comes in from the kitchen with two cups of tea, their tags fluttering as she sets one down by her dad's elbow and the other at her own place before coming around the sofa, gathering up Frankie's hair and exposing her injection site.

Frankie draws her knees up to her chest, half-listening to her mum prepping the neurotrypsaline gun and half-listening to the telly. The programme's about the PDS as a community after the Rising, the way Give-Back Scheme brought them all in contact with each other in a way they hadn't been before, and the ramifications: the burgeoning church of Our Lady of Lazarus, the political ULA with their commune in Wales and their doomsday prophecies.

The talking heads they've got now are PDS, which is a nice change from all the stuffy academics, really -- Frankie can't see what authority the living's got on the affairs of the undead.

"New species. How so?"

"A subspecies, if you will. A mutation. We're still human, in most of the ways that matter -- we are capable of music and art and life -- but we've adapted. Our daemons aren't visible because we've internalized them."

"Are they serious? Souls _inside_ bodies?" says her mum incredulously, and Frankie makes the mistake of glancing in her direction and sees the slip of a syringe, piercing the cellophane covering her day's dose of neurotrypsaline. Dread surges through her -- she could confront them about it and demand to know what they're adding to her medication, but that's what landed her PDS in the first place. "Eurgh, what a notion! Daemons all … caged inside of you? In your guts?" She shudders. "I'd rather talk about cannibalism."

"Hey now," says Frankie, forcing lightness. "Some sensitivity for the person in the room who used to consume human brains."

"Sorry, dear. No offense."

"It's _disgusting,"_ says her dad, and at his elbow his bullfrog daemon bellows out a throaty note of agreement.

She says nothing for a long while, watching Simon Monroe on screen gesture with the same passion he once used to convince her she had value, beating heart or not. On the back of Kieren's chair sits a dove neither of them will claim, though once or twice they'll turn their heads towards it like it's said something.

She wonders -- how much does Amy Dyer's dove daemon shine, under Glass?

She wonders -- in school tomorrow, could she go to Jem Walker? Could she ask for help?

"Right, of course," she murmurs, and bends her head forward. "Disgusting."

 

 

-  
fin

**Author's Note:**

> Helpful Google image references, if you wanted them: 
> 
> Winter wren: [[x](http://blog.uwgb.edu/biodiversity/files/2013/11/winter-wren.jpg)]  
> Rook: [[x](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2oQSJLXCM4w/UWcKxcXPfZI/AAAAAAAABXI/WXnfuJ0ptvI/s320/photo0001_1.JPG%20)]  
> Ghost bat: [[x](http://ih1.redbubble.net/image.4301257.4614/flat,550x550,075,f.jpg)]  
> Serval: [[x](http://www.kimballstock.com/pix/SER/01/SER-01-MH0005-01P.JPG)]
> 
> I'm on [tumblr](http://kaikamahine.tumblr.com/), if that's a thing you're into!


End file.
